BuddyPress.org

I’d like this shift. I’ve always found web friending a bit silly. I’m trying to use Buddypress for semi-professional communities. Groups is where the action should be and where Buddypress could really set itself apart from the Facebook wannabees.

To me the biggest barrier to more professional use of Buddypress is the lousy member/user management. Everything is based on username/password. There isn’t even a built-in way to get people to sign up with their real name, first name + last name. There is a required custom field for “Name”, but with the way the sign-up form is structured new users are almost encouraged to enter a garbage name – lowercase, one word anonymous nickname bs.

After lots of painful hacking in core files I now have a form with one Real name field on top. My custom code in the back splits the real name and stores it in various places in the database, so at least I have synchronized data in wp_usermeta etc. Buddypress does none of this out of the box and in general BP developers don’t seem to see this as a problem. But the one field for real name still doesn’t really force new users to enter a full two-part name.

In a previous version of my site I did have separate first name and last name fields. I NEVER had people sign up with cutesy one name names. Sure, you can create custom fields in xprofile, but synchronizing the input with all the other username, nickname, name etc. fields in the datebase and integrating them with other member management scripts businesses will have on their server requires serious database and php programming skills.

@ Jeff Sayre

impressive with this OAuth, BuddyPress, and Privacy plugin and this is the future..

So OAuth would make your site expand more maybe with FB and others !

I have a network of web entrepreneurs. It’s hard enough to get them to create blogs and actually use them. OK, that’s not only BP’s fault of course, but “full invested writer/bloggers” will set up their own blogs – I’m also a journalist, I would never write/blog in someone else’s network.

I think more advances are necessary to take it beyond this where users can contribute more content without having to be a full invested writer/blogger.

That’s why I need to come up with an external blog feed-in solution. Currently stuck in upgrading my theme… I also like the microblogging suggestions.

And Groups has limitless and unique opportunities; dynamic groups with lots of content within a private social network/community.

My worry:

Will Buddypress eventually target schools, companies, trade associations, sports clubs, etc.? Or even become enterprise ready? Or will it stay a more limited play thing for insider groups of dedicated blogging geeks with a lot of free time on their hands?

I HOPE that BuddyPress does not become a member aggregation site where, the more people, the more successful a site is “perceived” to be. That to me is the game that Ning is playing. Why in the world woulu Buddypress want to be another Ning?

I agree. That model is dead. I believe the concept of “private social networks” is different. Jeff’s privacy component is essential – haven’t had the chance to test it yet.

But there should be opportunities for low threshold content creation and communication and I would develop them around (micro)blogging. Again, I have mixed feelings about the addition of old-fashioned forums.

@derek

I think you have hit the nail on the head with this post. I don’t think that it is necessarily a long term assessment, but it describes what BuddyPress is best at right now. I think more advances are necessary to take it beyond this where users can contribute more content without having to be a full invested writer/blogger.

I am not saying everyone will want those features, but it seems like a lot of people do want to use BuddyPress as a content aggregator, not just a publication.

Remember these are all just ideas and specific to the behind the scenes code. As far as the user interface is concerned there would be no overlap.

@Erich73 In my opinion a BudyPress site works best if there are blog creators/writers and subscribers. Hopefully if things go well the majority should be Subscribers. Those folks will rarely if ever see the backend. I for one WANT my bloggers to have almost full access to the backend and all of it’s features. You have to give them that level of control to ensure their buy in. To me the best example of a really great BuddyPress site is a group of a half dozen or so rocking awesome blogs and a community that develops around them, NOT a community where 100 users have 100 play blogs where “test” becomes the prevailing blog title. You add some additional discussion related features like groups, forums, and events and i think you have a great formula for a thriving community.

I HOPE that BuddyPress does not become a member aggregation site where, the more people, the more successful a site is “perceived” to be. That to me is the game that Ning is playing. Why in the world woulu Buddypress want to be another Ning?

when this is helpful to you in order to solve some issue as you described in the related TRAC, then this is fine. Also it will give additional options for the user, as he will have better Admin-rights to manage his Friends and have his own Forum (you really want to have each user having his own forum – probably a great idea….).

However, it should be a clear differentiation between “generic Groups” and “Friends”.

Lets say I am running a Dating-network on which I do have generic Groups like “Dining”, “Travelling”, “Hobbies”, etc. , then it would not be nice if Friends-Groups would get mixed-up with generic-Groups.

Settings template is hardcoded at the moment (yes, we know). That file is a remnant from an earlier version of BuddyPress that was meant to make it easier to create one-screen plugins.

That fixed it dude!

<high five>

MrMaz

https://trac.buddypress.org/browser/trunk click on the zip file link at the bottom of the page. this should work nicely for your use case. the wire and status updates are merged into one concept

@Travel-Junkie

totally agree with you.

An “Admin-Theme” which mirrors the current testbp.org default-theme would be great.

BTW: thanks a lot for your great and professional support to get my website up and running !

You may try zlib compression. I gave a tutorial about it here: http://wpmu.org/dramatically-speed-up-wordpress-and-wpmu-load-times-with-this-simple-tip/

It improved my transfer speed by 3.5 times on my BuddyPress test installation.

I agree that buddypress should have a front-end dashboard for the normal users. Actually the only big obstacle is to move the posts wysiwyg to the front-end. Some plugins allready do this, but none work “superb” yet.

Beside the blog posts the users wouldn’t need access to the admin panel.

@MrMaz

Heres a screenshot..

http://porscheheritage.com/members/admin/album/picture/4

it looks like a problem with Chrome

http://porscheheritage.com/links

also looks bizzare on Chrome — im gonna geuss that its gonna look weird on Chrome and Safari or anything WebKit related..

The way I see it is that the blogs are the icing on the cake you get with a social network built on wp and bp. I don’t see the sense in a quick blog post form in the frontend. If you only want to write a quick note then use the activity stream. The wp backend is one of the best I have seen and I’ve worked with a lot of different systems. Why take all those goodies away from your users by restricting them to only use a few of the available features through a form on the frontend?

I mean, I would never use the QuickPress widget on the dashboard for the same reason. If you think your users will have problems with the backend interface (not likely, let em play around for an hour and they’ll be pros), then half a dozen short introductory screencasts about the various features are the way to go. Easy to make and once your users get the hang of it, they won’t want to go back. The wp backend is the most intuitive out there and it’s not gonna change anytime soon. Why should it?

With all that said I do agree that a unified look can only be beneficial to your community, so if you want to go that extra mile, then get someone to build an admin theme that mirrors the look of your site (or do it yourself).

I’ll be modifying the backend just a bit, I think. Change some colors around, add my own logo and then there’ll be a help page full with screencasts highlighting the features of both the front and the backend.

WPMU 2.8.6

BP 1.1.3

I just ran the installer right from Buddypress to install bbpress. Anyway to fix this or point me to where 1.2 could be downloaded from?

@derekbolden

when you create a Blog as a user, then you are being send into the WPMU-Dashboard-interface.

At least at my installation…….is it different at yours ?

Change it to 777 and see if it works, if it doesn’t at least your sure it isn’t your permissions.

After that see what the plugin might have altered, it could have changed a path in your buddypress.

(I presume you did deactivate it after getting the error)

http://www.rackspace.nl/content/images_za/ppc_landing_pages/virtualisation.gif

VPS is not the same as dedicated even though it’s close.

Not sure how many visitors you get per day, but on my home install (this pc) I got 100 visitors at a certain moment on my buddypress driven site and it didn’t even went over 10% (that while running a lot of other crap, like firefox and photoshop).

Setup: 3.07 GHz (i7 950) and 6 GB Ram.

Why not try running a simple script (maybe GD or something) outside of wordpress and see if you get 100% CPU, if it doesn’t, then accuse wordpress.

@DJPaul writing a check now! LOL

Downloading and testing plug in

oh and this statement:

“I think BuddyPress will be different things to different people… including the developers”

Is very true as bp is a a plug in architecture

I hear ya I was testing to see if it would only be theming issues but I think there are others. I’m finding that most of the bp plugins will have to be completely re-written to accommodate the current trunk.

A suggestion for this plug in is to make it similar to the way you add content to the activity streams on facebook.

The new default bp theme is very micro-blog / facebook feed and could use some media post capabilities.